[In the following interview, Paley comments on her upbringing, her fiction, the rewards of parenthood, and the value of community participation and political action.]

Grace Paley has been a respected name in American letters for years. Her new book of short stories, Later the Same Day, confirms her as an utterly original American writer whose work combines personal, political and philosophical themes in a style quite unlike anyone else’s.

Paley’s characters, women and men who have committed themselves to trying to alleviate some of the world’s myriad woes, usually appear in print as activists at demonstrations, marching with upraised fists. She has given them children, friends, lovers, aging parents, financial worries, shopping lists—in short, a private life to go with their public activities. Paley’s work is political without being didactic, personal without being isolated from the real world.

This striking individuality accounts for the profound impact of Paley’s writing, despite what is to her admirers a distressingly small body of work. Her first book, The Little Disturbances of Man, appeared in 1959; readers had to wait 15 years for the next one, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and just over a decade for Later the Same Day. “I do a lot of other things as well,” explains the author. “I began to teach in the mid-’60s, and at the same time there was the Vietnam War, which really took up a lot of my time, especially since I had a boy growing towards draft age. And I’m just very distractable. My father used to say, ‘You’ll never be a writer, because you don’t have any sitzfleisch,’ which means sitting-down meat.”

Her father’s comment is hard to believe at the moment, as Paley sits tranquilly in a wooden rocking chair in the sunny living room of her Greenwich Village apartment. A small, plump woman in her early’60s, with short, white hair framing a round face, she resembles everyone’s image of the ideal grandmother (so long as that image includes slacks, untucked shirttails and sneakers). As she does every Friday, she is simmering soup on the stove in her large, comfortable kitchen; she regrets that it’s not ready yet, as she thinks it would be good for her interviewer’s cold. She has to content herself with offering orange juice, vitamin C and antihistamines. Many of Paley’s stories express her deep love of children; meeting her, one realizes almost immediately that her nurturing instincts extend beyond her own family to include friends and even a brand-new acquaintance. It’s this pleasure in caring for others that makes her activism seem so undogmatic and natural, a logical extension of the kind of work women have always done. It’s more complex than that, of course—lifelong political commitments like Paley’s don’t arise out of anything so simple as a strong maternal instinct—but it helps to explain the matter-of-fact way in which the author and her characters approach political activity as the only possible response to the world’s perilous state.

The direction of Paley’s work is guided by similarly concrete considerations. One of the reasons she switched from poetry, her first love, to short stories was that she couldn’t satisfactorily connect her verse with real life. “I’d been writing poetry until about 1956,” she remembers, “and then I just sort of made up my mind that I had to write stories. I loved the whole tradition of poetry, but I couldn’t figure out a way to use my own Bronx English tongue in poems. I can now, better, but those early poems were all very literary; they picked up after whatever poet I was reading. They used what I think of as only one ear: you have two ears, one is for the sound of literature and the other is for your neighborhood, for your mother and father’s house.”

Her parents had a strong influence on Paley, imbuing her with a sense of radical tradition. “I’m always interested in generational things,” she says. “I’m interested in history, I’m interested in change, I’m interested in the future; so therefore I’m interested in the past. As the youngest child by a great deal, I grew up among many adults talking about their lives. My parents were Russian immigrants. They’d been exiled to Siberia by the Czar when they were about 20, but when he had a son, he pardoned everyone under the age of 21, so they got out and came here right away. The didn’t stay radical; they began to live the life of the immigrant—extremely patriotic, very hardworking—but they talked a lot about that period of their lives; they really made me feel it and see it, so there is that tradition. All of them were like that; my father’s brothers and sister all belonged to different leftist political parties. My grandmother used to describe how they fought every night at the supper table and how hard it was on her!”

As Paley grew older, there were family tensions. “My parents didn’t like the direction I was going politically,” she recalls. “Although my father, who mistrusted a lot of my politics, came to agree with me about the Vietnam War; he was bitterly opposed to it.” Her difficulties with her mother were more personal. “One of the stories in the new book, ‘Lavinia,’ was told to me by an old black woman, but it’s also in a way my story,” she says. “My mother, who couldn’t do what she wanted because she had to help my father all the time, had great hopes for me. She was just disgusted, because all I wanted to do at a certain point was marry and have kids. I looked like a bust to my family, just like the girl Lavinia who I’m convinced will turn out very well.

“There’s no question,” she continues, “that children are distracting and that for some of the things women want to do, their sense is right: they shouldn’t have children. And they shouldn’t feel left out, because the children of the world are their children too. I just feel lucky that I didn’t grow up in a generation where it was stylish not to. I only had two—I wish I’d had more.”

The experience of her own children confirmed Paley’s belief that each generation is shaped by the specific historical events of its time. “I often think of those kids in the Brinks case,” she says, referring to the surviving fragments of the SDS, who were involved in the murder of a bank guard during an attempted robbery in the early 1980s, after they had spent years underground. “If they had been born four years later, five years earlier. … It really was that particular moment: they were called. In one of the new stories [“Friends”], I talk about that whole beloved generation of our children who were really wrecked. I mean, I lived through the Second World War, and I only knew one person in my generation who died. My children, who are in their early 30s, I can’t tell you the number of people they know who have died or gone mad. They’re a wonderful generation, though: thoughtful, idealistic, self-giving and honorable. They really gave.

“The idea that mothers and fathers raise their kids is ridiculous,” Paley thinks. “You do a little bit—if you’re rich, you raise a rich kid, okay—but the outside world is always there, waiting to declare war, to sell drugs, to invade another country, to raise the rents so you can’t afford to live someplace—to really color your life. One of the nice things that happens when you have kids,” Paley goes on, “is that you really get involved in the neighborhood institutions. If you don’t become a local communitarian worker then, I don’t know when you do. For instance, when my kids were very little, the city was trying to push a road through Washington Square Park to serve the real estate interests. We fought that and we won; in fact, having won, my friends and I had a kind of optimism for the next 20 years that we might win something else by luck.” She laughs, as amused by her chronic optimism as she is convinced of its necessity. “It took a lot of worry, about the kids and buses going through the park at a terrific rate, to bring us together. You can call it politics or not; it becomes a common concern, and it can’t be yours alone any more.”

Paley believes such common concerns will shape future political activism. “One of the things that really runs through all the stories, because they’re about groups of women, is the sense that what we need now is to bond; we need to say ‘we’ every now and then instead of ‘I’ every five minutes,” she comments. “We’ve gone through this period of individualism and have sung that song, but it may not be the important song to sing in the times ahead. The Greenham women [antinuclear demonstrators who have set up a permanent camp outside the principal British missile base] are very powerful and interesting. When I went there the first time, I saw six women sitting on wet bales of hay wearing plastic raincoats and looking miserable. It was late November, and they said that on December 12 they were having this giant demonstration. I thought, ‘Oh these poor women. Do they really believe this?’ Well, three weeks later, on December 12, they had 30,000 women there. You really have to keep at it,” she concludes. “It’s vast; it’s so huge you can hardly think about it. The power against us is so great and so foolish.”

Yet Paley has never despaired—she notes in the story “Ruthy and Edie” that her characters are “ideologically, spiritually and on puritanical principle” against that particular emotion. “People accomplish things,” she asserts. “You can’t give up. And you can’t retreat into personal, personal, personal life, because personal, personal, personal life is hard: to live in it without any common feelings for others around you is very disheartening, I would think. Some people just fool themselves, decide they have to make a lot of money and then go out and do it, but I can’t feel like that.” Her voice is low and passionate. “I think these are very rough times. I’m really sorry for people growing up right now, because they have some cockeyed idea that they can get by with their eyes closed; the cane they’re tapping is money, and that won’t take them in the right direction.”

Despite the enormous amount of time and energy political matters absorb in Paley’s life, they remain in the background of her fiction. “I feel I haven’t written about certain things yet that I probably will at some point,” she says. “I’ve written about the personal lives of these people; I haven’t really seen them in political action, and I don’t know if I need to especially, for what I’m trying to do. There has to be a way of writing about it that’s right and interesting, but I haven’t figured it out. I’ve mainly been interested in this personal political life. But I refer peripherally to things: in ‘Living’ in Enormous Changes, where [the protagonist] is bleeding to death, she remembers praying for peace on Eighth Street with her friend; in ‘Zagrowsky Tells’ in Later the Same Day, he’s furious because they picketed his drugstore. That’s the way a lot of politics gets in, as part of ordinary people’s lives, and that’s really the way I want to show it, it seems to me now. What I want is for these political people to really be seen.”

The people who aren’t seen much in Later the Same Day are men: Jack, the live-in lover of Faith (Paley’s alter ego among her work’s recurring characters), is a fairly well developed presence, but the book’s focus is strongly female. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk about men,” Paley explains, “but there is so much female life that has so little to do with men and is so not-talked-about. Even though Faith tells Susan [in “Friends”], ‘You still have him-itis, the dread disease of females, and they all have a little bit of that in them; much of their lives really does not, especially as they get older. I haven’t even begun to write about really older women; I’ve only gotten them into their late 40s and early 50s.”

Is Paley bringing her characters along to her own current stage of life? “I’m very pressed right now for time to write; I just feel peevish about it,” she says. “But I’ve always felt that all these things have strong pulls: the politics takes from the writing, the children take from the politics, and the writing took from the children, you know. Someone once said, ‘How did you manage to do all this with the kids around? and I made a joke; I said, ‘Neglect!’ But the truth is, all those things pull from each other, and it makes for a very interesting life. So I really have no complaints at all.”